Conventional Illusions (collaboration with Wojciech Olejnik)

Site-specific painting, temporary installations in public space, digital animation, projection with overhead projectors. 2005.

As a collaborative team Wojciech Olejnik and I developed Conventional Illusions during a residency at the Banff Centre in October-December 2005. The works which make up the project are concerned with spatial issues that arise from the visual experience of architecture, namely mis-alignments between objects, visuality and cognition. The projects consider the way that visual information flows through the external and internal domains; the way it folds from one domain to the next to create contingent perceptions of seemingly familiar spaces. By relating the existing and imagined spaces of Conventional Illusions to the space of the body the works take on a visceral quality; they implicate the viewer in a system of architectural construction which is in a constant state of double fluctuation. This double fluctuation is contributed to on one level by the changing experience of the subject as they move through the space, but also the realization that space has a changing 'life of its own'; a constant variability which exists in its own right outside of the subject. In many ways then the project is an attempt to think architectural space as a subject itself (an other) and to empathize with its uncertain, ever-changing identity.